Keeping in the spirit of starting from the beginning, let’s look at some of the things that happen at the very start of life.

In utero, oxygen is delivered through the umbilical cord. The mother does the breathing. There is no air and very little blood in the lungs when in utero because the lungs are nonfunctional and mostly collapsed. The circulatory system is largely reversed, with oxygen-rich blood flowing through the veins and oxygen depleted blood flowing through the arteries. Humans even have blood flowing through vessels that won’t exist after birth, because they will seal off and become ligaments.

Being born means being severed from the umbilical cord – the lifetime that sustained you for nine months. Suddenly, and for the first time, you need to engage in actions that will ensure continued survival. The very first of these actions declares your physical and physiological independence. It is the first breath, and it is the most important and forceful inhalation you will ever take in your life.

That first inhalation was the most important one because the initial inflation of the lungs causes essential changes to the entire circulatory system, which had previously been geared toward receiving oxygenated blood from the mother. The first breath causes blood to surge into the lungs, the right and left sides of the heart to separate into two pumps, and the specialized vessels of fetal circulation to shut down and seal off.

That first circulation is the most forceful one you will ever take because it needs to overcome the initial surface tension of your previously collapsed and amniotic-fluid-filled lung tissue. The force required (called negative inspiratory force) is three to four times greater than that of a normal inhalation.

Another first-time experience that occurs at the moment of birth is the weight of the body in space. Inside the womb, you’re in a weightless, fluid-filled environment. Then, suddenly your entire universe expands because you’re out – you’re free. Now, your body can move freely in space, your limbs and head can move freely in relation to your body, and you must be supported in gravity. Because adults are perfectly willing to swaddle babies and move them from place to place, stability and mobility may not seem to be much of an issue so early in life, but they are. The fact is, right away you have to start doing something – you have to find nourishment, which involves the complex action of simultaneously breathing, sucking and swallowing. All of the muscles involved in this intricate act of survival also create your first postural skill – supporting the weight of the head. This necessarily involves the coordinated action of many muscles, and – as with all postural skills – a balancing act between mobilization and stabilization. Postural development continues from the head downward, until you begin walking (after about a year), culminating with the completion of your lumbar curve (at about 10 years of age).

To summarize, the moment you’re born, you’re confronted by two forces that were not present in utero: breath and gravity. To thrive, you need to reconcile those forces for as long as you draw breath on this planet. The practice of yoga can be seen as a way of consciously exploring the relationship between breath and posture, so it’s clear that yoga can help you to deal with this fundamental challenge.

To use the language of yoga, life on this planet requires an integrated relationship between breath (prana/apana) and posture (sthira/sukha). When things go wrong with one, by definition they go wrong with the other.

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The most basic unit of life, the cell, can teach you an enormous amount about yoga. In fact, the most essential yogic concepts can be derived from observing the cell’s form and function. Cells are the smallest building blocks of life, from single-celled plants to multitrillion-celled animals. The human body, which is made up of roughly 100 trillion cells, begins as a single, newly fertilized cell.

A cell consists of three parts: the cell membrane, the nucleus and the cytoplasm. The membrane separates the cell’s external environment, which contains nutrients that the cell requires, from its internal environment, which consists of the cytoplasm and the nucleus. Nutrients have to get through the membrane, and once inside, the cell metabolizes these nutrients and turns them into the energy that fuels its life functions. As a result of this metabolic activity, waste gets generated that must somehow get back out through the membrane. Any impairment in the membrane’s ability to let nutrients or waste out will result in the death of the cell via starvation of toxicity. This observation that living things take in nutrients provides a good basis for understanding the term prana, which refers to what nourishes a living thing. Prana refers not only to what is brought in as nourishment but also to the action that brings it in.

Of course, there has to be a complementary force. The yogic concept that complements prana is apana, which refers to what is eliminated by a living thing as well as the action of elimination. These two fundamental yogic terms – prana and apana – describe the essential activities of life.

Successful function, of course, expreses itself in a particular form. Certain conditions have to exist in a cell for nutrition (prana) to enter and waste (apana) to exit. The membrane’s structure has to allow things to pass in and out of it – it has to be permeable. It can’t be so permeable, however, that the cell wall loses its integrity; otherwise, the cell will either explode from the pressures within or implode from the pressures outside.

In the cell (and all living things, for that matter), the principle that balances permeability is stability. The yogic terms that reflect these polarities are sthira and sukha. All successful living things must balance containment and permeability, rigidity and plasticity, persistence and adaptability, space and boundaries.

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